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By Root 9907 0

for Eastern cities to worship the whole Senate in a body, putting up six hundred statues in each of their shrines, one way out of the difficulty, certainly, was for them to worship the Senate's chief executive officer, who happened to be himself. So the Senate, feeling complimented that each member had in him at least one six hundredth part of divinity, gladly voted Mascenas' motion, and shrines to Augustus were immediately erected in Asia Minor. The cult spread, but at first only in the frontier provinces, which were under the direct control of Augustus, not in the home provinces, which were nominally under the control of the Senate, not in the City itself.

Augustus approved of Livia's educative methods with Julia and of her domestic arrangements and economies.

He had simple tastes himself. His palate was so insensitive that he did not notice the difference between virgin olive oil and the last rank squeezings when the olive-paste has gone a third time through the press. He wore homespun clothes. It was justly said that. Fury though Livia was, but for her unwearying activity Augustus would never have been able to undertake the immense task he set himself of restoring Rome to peace and security after the long disasters of the Civil Wars—in which he himself had, of course, played so destructive a part. Augustus' work filled fourteen hours a day, but Livia's, it was said, filled twenty-four. Not only did she manage her huge household in the efficient way I have described, but she bore an equal share with him in public business. A full account of all the legal, social, administrative, religious and military reforms which they carried out between them, to say nothing of the public works which they undertook, the temples which they redeified, the colonies they planted, would fill many volumes. Yet there were many leading Romans of the elder generation who could not forget that this seemingly admirable reconstitution of the State had only been made possible by the military defeat, secret murder or public execution of almost every person who had defied the power of this energetic pair. Had their sole and arbitrary power not been disguised under the forms of ancient liberty they would never have held it long. Even as it was, there were no less than four conspiracies against Augustus' life by would-be Brutuses.

III

THE NAME "LIVIA" IS CONNECTED WITH THE LATIN WORD which means Malignity. My grandmother was a consummate actress, and the outward purity of her conduct, the sharpness of her wit and the graciousness of her manners deceived nearly everybody. But nobody really liked her: malignity commands respect, not liking. She had a faculty for making ordinary easy-going people feel acutely conscious in her presence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings .1 must apologise for continuing to write about Livia, but it is unavoidable; like all honest Roman histories this is written from "egg to apple": I prefer the thorough Roman method, which misses nothing, to that of Homer and the Greeks generally, who love to jump into the middle of things and then work backwards or forwards as they feel inclined. Yes, I have often had the notion of re-writing the story of Troy in Latin prose for the benefit of our poorer citizens who cannot read Greek; beginning with the egg from which Helen was hatched and continuing, chapter by chapter, to the apples eaten for dessert at the great feast in celebration of Ulysses' home-coming and victory over his wife's suitors. Where Homer is obscure or silent on any point I would naturally draw from later poets, or from the earlier Dares whose account, though full of poetical vagaries, seems to me more reliable than Homer's, because he actually took part in the war, first with the Trojans, then with the Greeks.

I once saw a strange painting on the inside of an old cedar chest which came, I believe, from somewhere in Northern Syria. The inscription, in Greek, was "Poison is Queen", and the face of Poison, though executed over a hundred years before Livia's birth, was unmistakably the face of Livia.